


Iota

by ectoBisexual



Series: Burn Your Fire for No Witness [1]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Commission fic, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Mental Health Issues, Living Together, Max is so in love it kills her daily, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-06 03:56:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5402156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectoBisexual/pseuds/ectoBisexual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is time, turning both of your bodies inside out. You never want to rewind away from this moment. You love her, and that's enough.<br/>-<br/>A day in the life of Max and Chloe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iota

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much to max for commissioning me, i will write about these two until my heart stops.
> 
> iota: an extremely small amount. alternatively, my favourite angel olsen song, and my official pricefield anthem.
> 
> commission info is here: http://cloverguts.tumblr.com/post/129385688821/andys-emergency-commissions-please-take-2
> 
> enjoy!

At 4pm she lies there like steel, staring up at the sky as if it were visceral and tangible, a collection of dismantled entities. During this time you stare at her, stare at the way her eyes move and she does not, a collection of dismantled promises. You and her, a collection of dismantled everything. Caricatures of a life you're still not sure you deserve to live, letalone know how to in the first place. Chloe Price, statue of a static past. Max Caulfield, the walking faded photograph.

Rewind. Rewind in your head, eyes shut so that the scarlet of the blood moving around inside of your eyelids lights up your world in crimson technicolour. 11 am, she is crawling from your shared bed like she's going to stomp the meanness out of the whole world, slipping on a shirt-- yours, stale-smelling and discarded on the bedroom floor-- and hopping out of the room on feet as light as air. You stay in bed a few minutes more because you want to smile into your pillow like some girl in a romantic movie. You hear the stove start up, and Chloe's "fuck yeah" cry of victory as she breaks an egg.

When you were 15 you remember seeing a movie. It was late and you were tired, the kind of viewing of a television special that comes back as a memory like warped tunnel lights, surreal, like you're unsure whether you really saw it at all or dreamed the whole thing up. (Which is how you feel about Chloe, sometimes. But that's terrible.)

In this movie a girl loses her family to a car crash or illness or a fire and something switches off in her brain. You're not sure if for good, but you remember not believing it was a movie, the way the actress looked. Her eyes were open but they might as well have been closed; seeing nothing, holding nothing in their nebulae pattern. You remember the empty expression on her face. The human part of her gone so that she was just 'being'. You remember thinking that you had seen that expression once, just once before, on Chloe's face when William died. What you felt then wasn't even guilt. It was deeper than that, gnawing a hole in your stomach. You don't think it ever went away after that.

At 4:30 you watch the sun move behind the clouds, overcast and bright white like you're looking into heaven headlong. Chloe still hasn't moved by this point, but at least you don't think she's a statue anymore, the way her chest moves, heaving as if she's one of Michelangelo's angels come to life. You look at her eyes and think that maybe she's more like Story's Angel of Grief. You're not sure. Art is your thing, but not sculpting, and certainly not stone. Stone is permanent.

Rewind. At 2pm she pulled you into the light of your living room and made you dance with her to some terrible indie rock song that was blasting out of the radio. You're a terrible dancer and you stepped on her feet more than once. She put her hands all over you, hair going wild, grinned at you with the force of the sun. Your girl, shaking like a hurricane. When the song was done she was breathing hard because she's Chloe Price and she's a goddamn adventure, and you pulled her in by the back of the neck and kissed her as hard as you could on the mouth.

You expected her to moan with surprise, like she normally does, but Chloe, oh. Chloe sighed, the sound of it like chimes and the taste of it like molasses on your tongue. She sighed and searched like the tide, her heart is at sea, oh: Your girl. That was all you could think, the feel of it so hot in your chest that you had to bite your tongue. _Your_ girl, wrecked as she is, as you both are.

Chloe kissed your chin feather light and you melted. Really and truly, right there on the floor. You're still waiting for someone to come and mop you up.

Rewind. 9am she wakes you up by going down on you, sweet and slow like she hardly ever is. Half asleep, you look down at her, at the halo of light surrounding her hair from the half-drawn curtains that only just hit this part of your bed. Blearily you want to reach for your camera, but your hands end up tangled in her hair, somehow. She glances up. It's like glancing into the sun. You go blind with the force of your own orgasm.

At 10pm Chloe tugs you upstairs by the wrist. She's still talking. "We used to have fun," she teases, in the voice she uses when she wants you to think she's drunk. You know she isn't, because you switched her out from wine to water when she started to look vacant. Backwards Jesus, that's you. "We're like old ladies. Walking the dogs, talking about meeting up with your parents for lunch."

By 'we used to have fun', she means, ' _I_ used to have fun'. Before all this. Not before you, but before it hurt to be with you, to be with anyone that knows her as well as you do.

You only know this because she told you one night when she was crying and shaking in your arms, not like a leaf but like a whole forest gone wild, trembling and vibrating and: "You know me, you know me. You look at me and you know everything and I  _hate it._ "

Bewildered, you had said, "You hate me?"

"No, no, no. Never you. Asshole. Idiot. I love you so much it kills me."

You love her so much, you'll die a hundred times in her place, you thought. You didn't say this out loud.

"I like walking the dogs," you say at 10:04. You have two of them, Avedon and Stevie. They're these two little fluffy things that Chloe treats like her own children. You know she's right, about the old ladies thing. Since Arcadia Bay everything has been much more quiet, between the two of you and everyone else. You both needed it. Once your parents bought you the house you thought that things might get back on track, and they did, to an extent. You went back to school. Chloe works almost every day, after 12 so that she gets to sleep in, but never on Sundays, which is today. On Sundays you stay home and you play music and you love each other and love each other and never want to stop.  _Your girl. Your girl._ Feel the words like a natural disaster, bury them in your skin. _  
_

"Not what I meant," she laughs. You look at her.

"So let's go to India."

"Ha. Sure, Mad Max, I'll go pack right now."

"I'm serious."

That stops her. Halfway up the stairs she looks down at you. You can barely see her in the dark but you know she has gone completely still, can just make out the concentrated look in her eyes as she tries to figure you out. Finally: "...Why India?"

You shrug. "I don't know, it was the first place I thought of. We could go to Peru-- or Paris. There's a lot of art in Paris."

"Oh, yeah. We can be grandmas in the  _Louvre._ "

She isn't taking you seriously. You want to kiss it out of her but that won't work, either. So you keep talking, knowing she'll listen. "Okay. Let's go to Amsterdam. Pot's legal there, and there are a lot of nightclubs. We could rent a room in a cheap motel and eat Dutch food until we feel like coming home."

You watch as she gets it. Watch the way it dawns on her, like lightning. She shifts on one foot. Her breath comes in a hum as she considers it, thunder and indecision and everything you love. "You're serious," she says, sounding impressed.

You nod. Light is coming in from the stairway window, just enough from the moon that you can see the top of her head, where her roots are coming in through blue dye. She can see all of you, and it feels like switching places, black mirrors and crystal balls. You blink at her slowly the way cats say I Love You. Finally she gets it, and she starts to move up the stairs again, dragging you with her. 

"Can we even afford tickets?"

"I don't know. I'll borrow it from my parents."

"You're acting crazy. That's  _my_ job."

"You want to. _I_ want to go." It'll be good for you. I'll follow you anywhere, Chloe, anywhere you need to go to feel like you again.

You enter your bedroom that smells like candle wax and laundry. Stop in the doorway, take it all in. This is your life now.

Rewind to 6 pm when you order pizza because you're both lazy. You feel like a kid again, sitting with Chloe's legs curled up against yours on the sofa, stuffing yourself on greasy takeout and watching crude cartoon comedy. Chloe snort-laughs when she really finds something funny and that's just the best. After dinner you make out for a bit and then you read a book with your head in her lap. Then you make out some more, the both of you tasting like tomato and cheese. It's comforting in the weirdest way, like normality is trying to crawl down your throat and it tastes like pizza. But you want it, you want it so badly. You'll take a cheesy makeout with Chloe Price over an adventure any day.

She doesn't move from where she's lying in the grass outside, smoking weed, until 4:55. She stirs like she had forgotten you were there. Her eyes have gone red and she blinks, blearily, sitting up to rub them both. "What time is it?"

"5," you say.

"M'hungry."

"Of course you are," you say patiently, with only a hint of teasing in your tone. "You're high."

She blinks at you and grins lazily. You want to ask what she was thinking about, lying so statically and staring at the sky, but you don't want to push her back to that dark place.

"You're  _beautiful_ ," she counters, poking you in the hip like this means something, some private joke between the two of you. You laugh and poke her back. She tackles you to the ground, straddles your hips in a non-sexy way and stretches her arms to the sky. She looks like an angel again, only this time not made of stone, no, made of light and reaching to the place she hails from and tipping her chin back like she's free. Then she flops on you and crushes the air from your lungs, and you groan to get her off.

"Ugh, I could live on top of you, Caulfield. Or in your pants. Totally."

"You're gonna murder me," you wheeze.

"Hm, yeah. Gonna stay right the fuck here, 's real nice."

You're about to shove her off when she tucks her head under your chin ever so gently, like a bird finding its nest. Who needs air, anyway? You resign yourself to a death of asphyxiation and a warm body pressed into yours, sharp, bony joints and all. In this moment you don't even care a little bit whether you need to breathe or not.

"Oh, man. I'm  _hella_ not coming down from this high until I get carbs into me. Oh my god, imagine pasta right now. Or  _bread._ "

"Let's order a pizza," you say instead. You're so happy suddenly, so overcome with affection, that you want to give her the whole world. She used to say _hella_ like she was preaching gospel. It's so _her_ that it sounds almost foreign to your ears, an audio track of both of you from another life. At the mention of pizza, Chloe gasps like you've just philosophized the most ingenious idea ever.

"I'm so in love with you," she groans appreciatively, and rolls off. You have to pretend to be grateful for gaining back your mobility. While you order the pizza she nuzzles your side and digs into you like a cat, and for the first time all month you think that you wouldn't mind if the two of you never left the house again. Just like this, side by side, and you'll be okay, you think. You and Chloe, conquering the world in quiet breaths.

At 10:30 Chloe starts to drift and you put down your book. It sounds full against the hollow nightstand. You close the door and go to bed, moving under the covers to press up against her like a promise that she'll never have to do anything bad ever again. 

Sometimes you wish for a fight, just to have something to fight about. Sometimes you wish she would break things and turn to fire like you know she can and has before.

Instead she presses into you like a silent tsunami, like an earthquake or a wild fire that speaks in sign, and you decide that you don't miss your rewind powers one bit. You never want to rewind away from this moment. You don't need to relive anything that you can hold in your palms whenever you want, that you can drag your sleepy fingertips over so that it sighs and shifts and moves into your body like a concomitant miracle. 

In the dark, Chloe whispers, "Were you serious about Amsterdam?"

"Yes," you whisper back. That's all you have to say. She kisses you and then she's in your arms again, exhausted driftwood, the blood and bones of the most precious thing in the world to you falling warm and vulnerable under your weight while you plan in your head how you're going to get her plane tickets, because of course you will. Of course you will. You will give her the world. You owe her that.

Holding her in your arms is one iota of the malestrom that is your feelings towards Chloe Price. There is time, turning both of your bodies inside out.

It's 11pm. You love her, and that's enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> we'd close our doors and then we'd go to bed  
> we'd never have to do it all again  
> there wouldn't be one thing to fight about  
> and time would turn our bodies inside out  
> and time would turn our bodies inside out


End file.
